Selecting a Stylesheet

Using Stylesheets is an effective method of applying consistent format and appearance standards to categories of documentation, independent of the templates or other methods of defining document content you use. Stylesheets increase the flexibility of your documentation generation, in that you can:

Provide a suite of documents generated from different templates with the same style standards, using one Stylesheet, and

Deliver the same document content in different styles for different customer audiences by applying different Stylesheets to documents generated from one template

Enterprise Architect provides six standard Stylesheets - three for printed documentation and three for online documentation. Your report designers can copy these as the bases for custom Stylesheets, reflecting the corporate standards of your organization. Each custom Stylesheet can define a totally different page layout and document styles to other Stylesheets and to the Normal.rtf Stylesheet. You can access both system and custom Stylesheets from the 'Stylesheet' drop-down list on the 'General' tab of the 'Generate Documentation' dialog.

Style Hierarchy

Stylesheets are the top level of a hierarchy of styles across the system.

Initially, all documents and templates, whether for linked documents or report documents, reflect the global styles defined in the Normal.rtf file; you can edit this file to provide new global styles for all documents and templates created after the update

In a specific document or template, you can edit the styles for that document or for all documents generated from that template; these edited styles override those of the same name in the Normal.rtf file, but any styles that have not been changed still reflect the definitions in the Normal.rtf file

You can use a Stylesheet to apply a set of style definitions to a generated document, independent of the template you use; these styles override any styles of the same name defined in the document templates and/or the Normal.rtf file

Notes

If you have custom templates that contain all the style definitions you need, or if you want to just use the Normal.rtf styles, you can continue to apply those simply by setting the 'Stylesheet' field on the 'General' tab to '<none>'